she's backed up by matt siegel, president of ourtime.org and civil rights attorney maya riley. what should i as the parent of a fifth grader and take away, and maya the parent of a third grader, what should we take away from this piece telling us that third grade is the critical moment? >> the first thing to realize is that it's never too late to help a student who is struggling in school. it's just that third grade is a particularly important year to intervene, to make sure that students are reading at grade level. because as you mentioned, this is the year when students go from learning to read, learning to decode, learning to apply their knowledge of the alphabet, to make sense of words on the page, to reading to learn, which means that they are reading these fact-filled books about the solar system, native americans, the civil war. they're learning from what they're reading. if at that point they haven't been able to make the leap to fast, fluent reading, they're not going to be amassing the knowledge, that background knowledge that their classmates are getting and they're